The Bloggy Blogface!

  One of my neighbors seems to have multiple homes in the area. Sometimes during the day, I'll spot him pedaling up the street and around the corner, where he'll lean his bicycle against a wooden post in the small carport next door. I have never seen him enter this house, and in the evenings I never see the lights on. Behind the carport sits a white garage, where throughout the week he'll park that bike, open the garage and get to work. For the next few hours, all of the noises coming from the garage are the same ones I heard in high school shop classes a thousand years ago.  Around six in the evening, he'll close up the garage, hop back on the bike, and ride back to wherever he rests his head at night.  With his grey tousled hair and wiry frame, I like to think he retired here from a northern state somewhere. Maybe he's a Vietnam veteran, like my father. He seems to be pals with another similar-looking fellow across the street from his garage. They'll sit outsi...

Ever since I endured another rotation around the sun this month, I have been having trouble sleeping. In the beginning, I would toss and turn for hours, until my brain decided enough was enough. It was usually five or six in the morning until I finally zonked out, followed by twenty to thirty minutes here and there of dreams until I would wake up again. By about ten in the morning I would be sick of this pattern, and just begin my day.  Lately this pattern has shifted to the nighttime. I'm finding myself dozing off around ten or eleven at night, which apparently leads to waking up for good at around four-thirty or five in the morning. Whenever I find myself awake in both circumstances, I can't help but reach for my phone. I'll flip through some apps, over to some news aggregator sites (Farker since the mid 2000's. Look it up) then back to some of the same apps that haven't updated content because, well, it's five in the damn morning, and most people I follow the...

I think I can speak for just about everyone that 2020 can go get fucked. There is no need for any end of the year reviews for this colossal dumpster fire. 2020 is that pain in your leg you know exactly what it is but just let it fester. 2020 is that incoming phone call you know who it is but you'd rather not answer. It is that bug flying around inside the lampshade you just can't swat dead quick enough. It is that dryer you've been picking clean clothes for the next day out of for weeks on end. 2020 is that book on the nightstand someone gave you that you don't really feel like reading, but they keep asking you about it. 2020 is that monthly bill from that Fortune 500 company of the service you need but can't afford to pay. 2020 is that package marked FRAGILE but still got smushed into your mailbox. It is the garbage nobody else wants to bring to the curb. It is the knife that is now too dull to slice when you don't have a sharpener. It is the roommate eating al...

  My brief and illustrious hockey career started and ended in ninth grade gym class. Believe it or not, a public school in upstate New York somehow afforded twelve flimsy hockey sticks in its inventory, in addition to some makeshift goals made out of the finest vinyl netting and PVC pipes. Half of us donned blue pinnies that smelled of sweaty onions, then soon we were off to do the hockeying. And the puck? A plastic, hollow version of the real ones. Better safe than sorry.  Our gym teacher for this fifty-minute class was some barrel-chested redhead who I think was also one of the football coaches. We started with our usual warm up stretches and sit-ups, absolutely the best exercises for the upcoming absurdity at hand. The school building had two gymnasiums, and we were scheduled to use the more run-down one on the second floor. None of my gym classes announced what we would be doing beforehand, so it was sort of a fun surprise to see what we were about to get ourselves into on...

Thanks to quarantine, my exceptionally chiseled physique has fallen into such sad atrophy. Unscrewing jars with my left hand has now become a silly, yet challenging task. Twice in the last couple weeks I have managed to sprain A) a knee and B) an ankle while doing things I always do - getting into a car, and walking. Looking forward to falling in the shower.  And speaking of walking, the only appropriate time I can do it is very early in the morning. Sure, maybe seven or eight in the morning doesn't seem that bad to some, but it is to me. It's too damn early! And there's too many people, with their dogs and cats and chickens or whatever they're walking up and down these streets. So I have been "postponing" the walking, to later, or mostly not at all. My cardiologist (if I had one) would be proud. My local grocery store has been playing some corny, yet timely, overhead announcement lately. The last line she utters is  "we're all in this together."...

The first time I visited, I had to park across the street in the lot of an abandoned gas station. The lot itself went up a slight hill, and the station's sign would occasionally spin some slow turns whenever the town spirits wanted to have some fun.  She lived in a questionably constructed building on the second floor of this sleepy Revolutionary War town, adjacent to a craft store that was hardly ever open. In the basement sat a four-lane bowling alley and a small bar. It was by appointment only, which really meant the building's landlord had to be there to serve drinks and keep an eye on the action. I didn't get a chance to bowl down there, but seeing the construction of the building, this was probably a good thing. When she moved out of her place, part of the process involved placing a three-foot wide plank over the bowling alley basement stairs, in order to move big furniture out. Needless to say she left the heavy lifting to the moving experts.  The new plac...

   We're now in day two-hundred something and counting of self-quarantine. I've been okay, knock on wood. Trying to avoid the larger petri dishes like the Walmarts and Targets and what not. Why would you even risk it at this point? Order your stuff online, if you can. I haven't been to either place in over a month now, but the last couple times I did show up, many grocery aisles were disheveled and partially bare. I've been sticking to my closer (and smaller) grocery and dollar stores, neither of which have featured paper products on the shelves for weeks. Grocery shopping in the time of the 'Rona has been ridiculous here, and everywhere else I'm sure. This is thanks in part to your hoarders and panic shoppers, who managed to purchase all packages of toilet paper every single day before stores finally started putting a limit on how many you could get. Nothing like sanitary essentials being treated like they're a Black Friday special, wheeled onto the sale...